Modern vehicles increasingly employ advanced electronic systems for improved communications, safety, vehicle operation and control. Due to their complexity, appropriate methods for testing and diagnosing the systems after deployment in the vehicle is important. However, in order to diagnose one or more of the systems, appropriate vehicle data often needs to be extracted from the systems. Service bays typically carry out the diagnostics during standard warranty services and/or following a suspected system failure.
Typically, a vehicle data bus infrastructure handles the signal communication to and from the system(s). Vehicle data bus architectures, and the data conveyed on the buses, are typically vehicle-dependent, or specific to the vehicle make and/or manufacturer. With exception to the legislative requirements (e.g. OBDII), conventional methods of interfacing with the vehicle data bus to effect diagnostics servicing often requires OEM-specific software and hardware.
These differences in bus standards and bus data content give rise to an ever-increasing number of vehicle variants. This increasing number of variants presents a problem to the people who create telematics applications that use vehicle data to provide meaningful content. An example of such an application is Navigation that employs road-speed data to perform dead reckoning.
Conventionally, application programmers often need an intimate understanding of each vehicle's data-bus architecture and associated knowledge in how to extract desired vehicle data from that architecture. This approach typically requires a substantial investment in time and cost for the programmer. In addition, the application generally requires customization from one vehicle make and/or model, to the next. This presents a problem in terms of application portability to all potential telematics platforms.
While the burdens and costs on the application programmer due to the conventional architecture described above present significant problems, the vehicle manufacturer also encounters undesirable issues. For example, in order to support the applications programmers conventionally, the vehicle manufacturer often must release sensitive intellectual property concerning the vehicle data-bus architecture. Moreover, the reliability of the vehicle electronics may be compromised through data access not controlled to the highest possible standards.
What is needed and as yet unavailable is a telematics-based vehicle data acquisition architecture that enables telematics application programmers to develop applications that can extract vehicle data with generic data requests independent of the vehicle data bus architecture. The telematics-based vehicle data acquisition system described herein satisfies this need.